Question

We have an issue with instrument names loaded into our data warehouse where they either loaded with the string all in upper case or in normal case (capital at the beginning of each word). We have a function that deals with changing all of the upper case strings into normal case and an example of some of these are below:

Merck & Co Inc Common Stock Usd.5
Newmont Mining Corp Common Stock Usd Inc 1.6

However there are parts of this which we would like to capitalise when it comes to reporting ie in the examples above ‘Usd’ should become ‘USD’, ‘Inc’ should become ‘INC’, ‘Corp’ should become ‘CORP’.

These are all held in a cross reference table, however i’m unsure of how i can update my select so that when i select my normal case instrument names it will check the cross reference table to ensure update(replace) the parts that should be capitalised into capitals.

I got as far as this:

CREATE TABLE capital ([InternalValue] VARCHAR(255), [ExternalValue] VARCHAR(255));

CREATE TABLE instrument ([Instrument] VARCHAR(255));

INSERT INTO capital ([InternalValue], [ExternalValue])
VALUES
('Usd', 'USD'),
('Ltd', 'LTD'),
('Corp', 'CORP'),
('Inc', 'INC')

INSERT INTO instrument ([Instrument])
VALUES
('Merck & Co Inc Common Stock Usd.5'),
('Newmont Mining Corp Common Stock Usd Inc 1.6');

SELECT REPLACE(Instrument, 'Usd', 'USD') FROM instrument AS i

But i don’t know how i can incorporate the capital table into this so that it can check the whole string for all possible capitalisations. Any help?

Answer 1

If you have your values that you want to use as a replacement in a table able you are going to perform this action repeatedly, then you could create a function to perform the replacement:

create function replacement(@string varchar(max))
returns varchar(max)
as
begin

    with ReplaceWord(InternalWord, ExternalWord) as
    (
        select InternalValue, ExternalValue
        from capital
    )
    select @string =  REPLACE(@string, r.InternalWord, r.ExternalWord)
    from ReplaceWord r
    where CHARINDEX(r.InternalWord, @string) > 0

    return @string
end

Then to query the data you can use:

SELECT dbo.replacement(i.Instrument) NewValue
FROM instrument AS i

See SQL Fiddle with Demo

Which will return:

|                                     NEWVALUE |
------------------------------------------------
|            Merck & Co INC Common Stock USD.5 |
| Newmont Mining CORP Common Stock USD INC 1.6 |

Note: I found the base code here from @SQL Kiwi and altered it to use a function if this is something you will have to do on a consistent basis